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I appreciate the "rant" as well.

1. First of all I feel many of these kids are a product of parental manipulation. One could take any child and with hours of teaching and practice teach them to do surgery, dentistry, fly a plane, etc. So what? To what end?

2. What is being sacrificed to all this piano practice? Friends, sports and exercize, movies, other music, reading? Will these children have a chance at being "normal"?

Tiger Woods was raised as a progidy, the world revolved around him all his life. He really turned into a nice family man...

+3! The arts are about communicating. Just as writers need to have something to say, so do painters, sculptors, and musicians. Stanza, you raise a really important point about the things being sacrificed to piano practice. Friends, sports, movies, etc all add up to being involved in life & having something to say artistically.

There have been some children who showed a lot of aptitude early in life though - Art Tatum & Ray Charles both started playing as soon as they could reach the keyboard; Duke Ellington, on the other hand, had lessons when he was a kid, but didn't show much interest, was more interested in sports, & studied commercial art in college. (I read a lot of biographies - about to start Bill Evans')

He was even very nice to his "extended family"...all 12 or so of them...

JF

my rant..
I don't have envy for those talented children but my heart goes out to their siblings (if they have any).

Maybe not completely the same circumstances, but I was also overwhelmed by competitiveness. For my mother, art is the most important thing. She did not care about my grades at all. My mom teaches Japanese dancing. She tried to teach me Japanese dancing but gave it up because of my lack of talent (supposedly I danced like a foot thumping pesant dancer and displayed total lack of gracefulness - I was only 6 years old). Ok, folks, don't criticise her now. She is an old beauty queen and has not really grown up. Anyway she decided to let me take music lessons instead. My brother, my cousins and I all played piano, violin and had to study drawing. Both my brother and one of my cousins won reginal piano competitions at different times. They were placed into "talented student's class" in my town's only music center. They got to take lessons from a young and beautiful teacher from Tokyo. She had a piano performance degree from a well known conservatory in Tokyo. My teacher was an old woman who was in charge of the rest of the students who deemed to be very average. She was very kind and patient but was very old school. I had to do those old Beyer piano books while my they were doing Burgmular piano pieces which was more musical and interesting than the ones on Beyer books. Anyway, when my brother who started 3 years later get ahead of me, I finally lost will to continue even though I like the music. We were constantly compared, it was too much to bear for my little heart.

Fast forward 30 years. Neither my brother or cousins are playing now I am old and matured and I don't care what other people say at this point. I like music therefore I do. Life is finite. We gotta do what we want to do. I am at least thankful that my parents sent me to piano lessons.

That's really interesting, FarmGirl. Most siblings take different instruments, so that probably cuts down on this sort of thing. One of my cousins was a child piano prodigy. She won regional competitions and played on TV before the age of 10. She played advanced pieces that challenged the span of her tiny hands as a kid. However, she's older than me so my parents used her as a role model to try to motivate me. It would probably be demoralizing if a younger cousin or sibling played better. My cousin is a very successful piano teacher now. Kudos to her!

Yes...Sometimes we're trying to prove a point. To defend our ego perhaps? Convicting myself as much as anyone else. Not an attack at you.

You really should look into Emily Bear.
The other post was wrong. All on her own. She started playing scales at 2 years old. Not 3.

Her mother is wise.... All she wants is for Emily to be a happy little girl.

Practice? Varies greatly. Also have to admit she's had some great teachers.

She writes music. Give her a word and she plays on the piano what it means to her musically. Probably at least in part due to her great teachers.

Last and most important. She says it comes from the heart. Which is one point most adults should listen to.

I do believe Emily is a true prodigy. I look forward to what she does with her favorite when she matures: Jazz.

Kids should be kids, and that includes adults fawning over them for what they're supposed to do. Maybe Emily wants to be a doctor, engineer, teacher, and not a pianist. My response to seeing videos on here was to say "interesting" and move on. Assuming the various news clips and youtube videos are actually "her", and not the result of careful editing, coaching, and marketing, I still have no interest in holding her up as some sort of example until she decides that's what she wants to do.

At some point these children have to grow up, until then, I feel more sympathy than wonder, awe, or respect. I've seen it happen before that the 7yo doing work of college students eventually becomes an adult, and at that point recognition for their level of skill becomes harder and harder to obtain, simply because they compete in the same arena as those with even more experience. At some point, mastery requires not only talent but experience.

Maybe my perspective is different, but seeing a kid play with such technique doesn't influence me in what I think of my skill much more or less than watching videos of other great players.

Frozenicicles, yeah, I wish my mom made my brother take some other instrument. But he wanted to take Piano since I was doing it. I also think it's fairly common that the younger one be successful - they have an advantage to listen to piano since when they are babies while the first one has to learn it from the scratch. My piano currnt teacher's solution is not to let two siblings perform the same piece for the recital and allow the parents to come to the performance portion of the annual recital. They can come to a little gathering after the performance. It may sounds a little extreme but she said that she was so shocked to see some parent's reaction (comparison, envy, etc)that decided to protect the children's self esteem. She says that kids knew when they did good and it would allow her to follow up with kids who did not do so well without having parents there.

I'm with the OP on this one

Sad that they could not help you with the music. Why not, did they not have the money or no time? Most parents would support their kids in music I suppose? Or did you ask for a drum kit



Too bad for you . Your hate will not help you I'm afraid...

Well, yes those videos bother me, but there are 200 other skills that I wish I had but don't: ability to ski double black diamond ski runs, understanding how to design digital electronics, ability to not laugh in yoga, the ability to do yoga, understanding differential equations, ability to converse fluently in about 12 other languages, the ability to play a violin or cello, better verbal communication skills, etc etc etc. Oh and I always wanted to play the bagpipes too but I don't.

Seriously, for the last piece that was assigned by my teacher, I needed to figure out how it was supposed to sound (a modern piece) so yes indeed, the first youtube that came up was an 11-year old in a competition playing it at lightning fast speeds. The negatives from watching this performance were far outweighed by the answers I got to my questions. If I can play it with half the grace that she displayed at 2/3 the tempo I think I should be ecstatic.

I think that the vast piano repertoire should give every learner, no matter what level, the enjoyment of music. That's what it's all about! Regret about the past is a bad thing.

Why envy? There are millions of prodigies on this planet (about 1 billion of them in China) and of those prodigies, only a fraction of a fraction of a percent ever make it to the concert stage.

Plus, the level of virtuosity that you see there can only be achieved at childhood - PERIOD. If you start piano at age 20, even with 8-12 hours of practice daily, you will never achieve this level. You might be able to play Moskowski Etude, but will never play it like her.

My mom would never have been able to afford piano lessons when I was young, let alone a real piano. And I was pretty much the laziest kid you could imagine!

I guess that makes me lucky because I can confidently say I haven't missed out on anything by only starting at age 26

I can even prove to myself how far adults can get if they have no instrument, voice, choir or theory background of any kind. Constant motivation!

Wisdom.

Right on. I find that, at age 57, I have what my arts-educator wife calls "intrinsic motivation." I practice long and hard because I enjoy it. I would not have done that when I was younger. (I mean, even, in my 20s and early 30s.)

I look forward to another 20-30 years of development as a pianist. I sort of wish I had done it earlier, but you know what? I had a piano in my house for decades and didn't play it. So maybe I've only now come to my time of playing piano.

I have often thought that I do not envy anything at all about the lives of prodigy kids.

There is nothing inherently bad about having regrets, it is perfectly normal and everyone has them, and if anyone comes to me and says they have no regrets, then my first assumption is that they are lying or have a complete inability to learn from their own mistakes.

The fact is that it is not the feeling of regret that matters, it is how you respond to that feeling of regret. Is Ebenezer Scrooge's regret when he is being visited by the various Ghosts of Christmas a bad thing? Of course not, that would be absurd. Regret can be quite useful.

Learning from mistakes has nothing to do with regret. Sure some people use feeling of regret to remind them of their mistake and thus not repeat it. However feeling regret is counterproductive since it is after all a negative feeling which doesn't make you feel good. You can still chose not to repeat a mistake, the reason being that you don't want something bad happen to you again. And without the regret you will feel even better!

Achieving that is another thing, though it is very possible and very beneficial.

That's how I look at it too. What's done is done, and it is what it is! The way I look at it - I have 40 more years of piano playing to look forward to. Sure, I missed 27 of those years, but I guess that's why I'm here on the ABF. This is actually one of may "regret posts" that I've seen here. Lots of us regret, but looking back at my childhood, I really had no interest or passion for piano whatsoever...lol.

Trust me Rozina ... everyone over 45 has regrets. And sometimes even under 20. Unless you're Yoda of course.